being venerable — as a tender stripling, capable of being improved into all that it ought to be, but scarcely yet had shown the remotest promise of becoming.

He had that sense, or inward prophecy, — which a young man had better never have been born than not to have, and a mature man had better die at once than utterly to relinquish, — that we are not doomed to creep on forever in the old bad way, but that, this very now, there are the harbingers abroad of a golden era, to be accomplished in his own lifetime. It seemed to Holgrave, — as doubtless it has seemed to the hopeful of every century since the epoch of Adam’s grandchildren, — that in this age, more than ever before, the moss-grown and rotten Past is to be torn down, and lifeless institutions to be thrust out of the way, and